Research in Visual Arts Education - The National Society for ...

FROM PSYCHOLOGY TO SEMIOTICS
Picture analysis in focus
In a survey of articles in the professional journal Teckning [Drawing] 1960–68,
Kolbjörn Waern (1972) found that articles about children’s drawings was a
dominant topic in the begin ning of the period but almost disappeared from
1965 when, incidentally, Gert Z Nord ström became a member of the editorial
staff. Instead, educational approaches and aims became major issues.
In their controversial book from 1970 called Bilden, skolan och samhället
[Picture, school and society], Nordström and Romilson summarized the
arguments in support of the new paradigm in art education. Emphasis was
laid upon the contents of a new subject for pictorial studies as well as on
the method of polarisation that was offered as a pro gressive alternative to
both“free” and authoritarian methods of teaching. According to this method
of organizing projects, the production of pictures should be preceded by a
system atic analysis of related pictures representing different ways of living,
acting, think ing, and so on. The implications of this method for teacher
education were illustrated a few years later in an even more provocative book
by Nord ström (1975) entitled Kreativitet och med vetenhet – den polariserande
pedagogikens grunder [Creativity and Consciousness: Founda tions of Teaching
by Polarisation].
Gradually, however, the focus of the writings by Nordström and his colleagues
shifted from the project method to semiotic picture analysis. In
Bildanalys [Picture Analysis] from 1973, some noted art critics and students
of visual culture (all with ties to Nordström’s Depart ment of art education)
presented short essays on the topic (Aspelin et al., 1973). In Bild & Myt [Picture
and Myth] a few years later, Nordström presents a project in collaboration
with three artists, using the methods of polarisation and picture analysis
in the preparatory stages of their artistic work (Nordström et al., 1976).
In the late 1970s two books with critical essays on the modernist movement
and its institutions were published by Torsten Bergmark, Peter Cornell,
Sten Dunér, Gert Z Nordström and some other persons connected with the
Depart ment of art education (Bergmark et al., 1977; Cornell et al., 1979).
In 1984, Nordström published Bildspråk och bildanalys [Pictorial Language and
Picture Analysis], a textbook based on the developments at his department
during the 1970s. Here semiotics is introduced and developed as a handy tool
for analysing mass media:
Researchers who want to study contents and expression in the mass culture soon realize
the limitation of traditional theory of art and will therefore search for other theories,
which promise to supply them with better tools. General semiotics, which tries to
embrace all sorts of signs that can be produced and interpreted, will for obvious reasons
attract attention, especially since it proposes new approaches to various domains. One
wants to see what it is good for (p. 64).
44 NORDIC VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION IN TRANSITION